![]() The novice traveller might conclude from such scenes that a little television could hardly do these folks much harm at least they could sit and stare at something that moves faster than plate tectonics. ![]() Of the country's 600,000 people, 85% are entirely occupied by subsistence agriculture, and are so scattered among remote villages that most of them live at least a day's walk from the nearest road. ![]() Serfdom didn't become illegal here until 1958 - and 10 miles outside Thimphu you're still practically in the Middle Ages. The Bhutanese have long brought up the rear in the global race toward modernity. In two hours, a consultant from Hong Kong will throw a switch in the little studio behind the Queen, and Bhutan will begin bouncing one-kilowatt broadcast signals off its age-old hills. But now this last and most wilfully isolationist of the Buddhist Himalayan kingdoms - which, through cunning, diplomacy and blind geographic luck, has somehow avoided getting overrun by history - is bracing itself for the most pitiless invader ever loosed upon this world: television.
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